I am often asked the question, “Why are South African children scared of science?”
There are many answers to this question, but I would like to focus on four issues gleaned from a lifetime of involvement in non-formal science education, all interrelated: early brain development, the process of learning, the importance of play and “digital diarrhoea”.
The brain is a remarkable organ, widely considered to be the most complex system in the universe. It is soft, has no moving parts and is not sensitive to touch. It needs oxygen, glucose and physical exercise to function properly, is flushed by 35 litres of blood every hour, and uses about 20% of our body energy. It contains more than 10-billion neurons, has more than 1 000-billion-billion connections and sends and receives electro chemical messages through a 50 000km-long network of nerves.
We now know that a newborn baby’s brain has the basic neural structures in place to see, hear, feel, cry, move, hold on tight, and do a few other things. But the neurons in its brain still need to make most of their connections.
The hard wiring of a baby’s brain will take place mainly after birth, and especially during the first four to five years of life, although this will continue to a decreasing degree into old age. A newborn baby’s brain is like a computer with internet connectivity but no addresses in its mailbox. What the child does, and the stimuli to which it is exposed, will determine how its brain is wired up.
A stark example of this phenomenon was shown by two young girls in India in the 1920s who were tragically abandoned by their parents and brought up in the wild by wolves. They were rescued at the ages of three and five and every attempt was made to raise them as normal children. However, their brains had been hardwired as wolves — they had sharp eyesight and hearing, ran around on four legs, ate only raw meat, preferred the company of dogs, never learned to speak and never developed human self-awareness. They died young, with much depression and anxiety.
So the first question we need to ask ourselves is: do we expose our young children to the appropriate range of external stimuli and activities that allow them to hardwire their brains in an optimal way? Do we excite all their senses, expose them to a wide range of three-dimensional environments, encourage them, as they grow older, to participate in a wide range of activities that will ensure that their brains are hardwired for all eventualities?
Or do we closet them in unstimulating environments for our own convenience, over-discipline them and reduce the range of activities in which they engage, or babysit them in front of two-dimensional environments such as television?
But what relevance does this have to science education? Research has shown that the basic ingredients of a scientific mind — inquisitiveness, wonder, problem-solving, 3D visualisation, skill with numbers and counting, logic — are laid down during the early development of a child.
We are only now starting to understand the processes of learning and memorisation. Our brains do not remember things in the same way as computers, in which entire files are saved and can be recovered. In contrast, our memories are preserved electrochemical pathways that are not physically stored but can be retriggered when they are needed again. They therefore exist only when they are recalled.
Research has shown that emotionally laden memories, such as the birth of a baby, death of a relative, an important political event or a traumatic or exciting experience, tend to be remembered more accurately, and for longer.
Our brain tends to discard most of the information that reaches it and retains only what we need. In fact, it has been calculated that our brains have a relatively small capacity for storing information (about 1.25 gigabytes), less than the average memory stick, and probably 60 times less than your laptop. But our brains have enormous processing power, far greater than any mainframe computer in existence.
In the science centre world, we use this information to improve the impact of our teaching. We make sure that our interactive teaching activities — science shows, science demos, science theatre, excursions — are emotionally charged and exciting events that permanently lodge most of the information that we are trying to convey to the brains of our learners.
It has also been shown that learning is more efficient if the learner is directly engaged in the process rather than being a passive observer. Research by the Agastya Foundation in India has shown that learning is least efficient when the child is reading alone (about 10% of the content is retained), hearing (about 20%) or seeing (30%). The amount of content retained increases dramatically when the child is involved in discussion with others (70%), or participates in direct experiential activities and “smart play” (80%), and is most efficient when the child is sharing his/her knowledge with others (more than 95%).
This is why learning in an interactive science centre environment is so efficient. The children are engaged directly in the teaching activity, they discuss what they find, try the experiment again, solve problems and pass their newfound knowledge on to others, often complete strangers.
The value of interactive teaching methods has been appreciated for over 1 000 years, from the first House of Wisdom in the 9th century in Baghdad where scientists made interactive “trick devices” to teach youngsters how things work, to the hands-on lectures of Sir Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution in London in the 19th century and the modern generation of interactive science centres that started in Toronto and San Francisco in the 1960s and has spread around the world.
In our hectic modern world, we have an obsession with being busy, and we transfer this obsession to our children. Increasingly, we view a child who is playing as wasting time, when he or she could be doing something more constructive, even educational, such as watching television or surfing the internet. Our children are often subject to ruthless timetables of scheduled activities with little or no opportunity for “free play”.
What we fail to realise is that playing is probably the most important thing a child does. Playing games and playing with toys is the first draft of life. Playing helps to develop initiative, improve the ability to concentrate, develop problem-solving and decision-making skills, nurture the ability to visualise solutions and foster spontaneity — all important qualities of a budding young scientist. Smart play also teaches children how to grasp social values, such as roles and responsibilities, and to demonstrate creativity within the rules.
Researchers in the United States have found that children who do not play and are rarely touched have brains that are 20% to 30% smaller than normal for their age. They also found that playing with toys may stimulate the development of 25% more brain synapses in each neuron.
Professor Edgar Klugman, a leading authority in the field in the United States said: “Play is one of the most important areas of activity in which children engage as they grow up and develop. Play contributes positively to a child’s ability to learn, interact and communicate with other children and develop abstract thinking skills . . . The vital life skill of being able to visualise future events is directly derived from the skills learned while playing as a child.”
Do computer and arcade games count as “smart play”? I don’t think so. Computers and the internet convey information, develop hand-eye co-ordination, hone computer and internet skills, but I see little evidence that they provide a solid foundation for the child to develop the abstract thinking skills that are required of a budding scientist, or a professional in any field.
Research by the British Psychological Society (BPS) has revealed that excessive exposure to digital media (computers, internet, social networking pages, television) may have several detrimental effects on a child (or adult), including slowing the metabolic rate, stunting development of the brain, increasing the incidence of attention deficit disorders, or increasing the likelihood of being involved in violence-related crime. It may also cause depression and social withdrawal, and may permanently hinder the educational process.
In 2005 the BPS recommended that children under the age of four should not be exposed to television or computer games, that four- to 14-year-olds should be limited to one hour’s exposure a day, and children and adults older than 14 should not use a computer or television more than two hours a day. Most of us exceed this limit.
There are two issues here: firstly, that excessive exposure to digital media may be harmful to us and our children, and, secondly, that these relatively useless activities are replacing activities that could be as enjoyable (if not more so) while also doing us good.
I read recently of a new school that has been established in South Korea to deal with children who suffer from digital addictions. In this school, the students are exposed to radical activities that they have never done before, even though many of them are already in their teens. These activities include riding a bicycle, paddling a canoe, milking a cow, climbing a tree and making a soapbox car. Tragic, isn’t it? I’m sure that we don’t want our children to go the same way.
I have even heard a comment, untested as yet, that children from historically disadvantaged communities in South Africa may be better prepared for school than children from rich backgrounds as the former have had ample opportunity for free play whereas the latter have been locked into two-dimensional digital environments since an early age.
What do you think?
Professor Mike Bruton is director of imagineering at MTE Studios and the founder of the MTN Sciencentre in Cape Town and the Old Mutual-MTN Sciencentre in Umhlanga. He has had a lifelong interest in the nature of creativity and the process of learning. He currently designs museums and science centres for MTE Studios, a specialist consultancy company involved in themed architecture and edutainment